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At CES 2009, we spent an impressive couple minutes with the phone Palm was counting on to save its company from irrelevance.

Five hype-filled months later, Pre is out in the world and we got some serious finger time with it before yesterday’s launch. While it won’t totally revolutionize the mobile industry, it should provide a substantial motivation for industry big boys like Google, RIM (BlackBerry) and even the mighty Apple to crank up their R&D budgets if they hope to maintain their edge over the ailing smart phone maker.

The hardware is impressive, boasting a 3.1-inch touchscreen, that’s smaller than the iPhone, but maintains the same 320×480 resolution making it look sharp. The display slides upward – a motion you might find slightly awkward at first – to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard.

It’s not quite as robust as a Black- Berry, but combined with the screen’s multi-touch capabilities, it provides an extremely efficient solution for entering data.

While the phone itself brings enough of a wow-factor, it’s the software inside that actually makes this a phone worth talking about. The newly designed Linux-based operating system is a huge step up from the old Palm platform.

It uses windows called “cards” to allow you to run several applications at once, making it the first smart phone capable of true multitasking. Switching from the browser to e-mail to your contacts list – and to Bejeweled when you’re stuck at the airport – requires only a finger swipe and drastically cuts down on the amount of time you spend staring at load screens.

To manage contacts and calendars, webOS relies on an included app called Synergy that automatically synchronizes accounts like Gmail, Google Calendar, Outlook, AIM and even Facebook.

The implementation is solid, but think hard about which accounts you would like included, otherwise, you might end up with a contact list cluttered with people you rarely need to talk to (for example: random friends from high school).

While the phone definitely feels ready for primetime, there are a few problems. The lack of memory expansion means the 8 GB of built-in storage might get clogged up, especially if you take a lot of pictures with the 3.2-megapixel camera.

Also, the lack of visual voicemail, which translates voice messages into text, is disappointing. But, unless you really hate listening to your voicemail, Pre is ultimately a winner. Just do yourself a favor and try typing on one before donating your Blackberry Bold to an intern.